So Coalville Town are disappearing from view... but why?
A football club is set to disappear down the non-league pyramid for reasons which aren't entirely clear.
To say that it was a surprise would be something of an understatement. Just four days prior to the announcement that Coalville Town would be resigning their place in the Southern League and dropping their senior men’s team three divisions down the football pyramid to Step Six, everything had been proceeding very much as per normal.
The club was announcing pre-season friendly fixtures, including matches against a Leicester City XI—their first since 2013—and Ilkeston. They announced a new signing for next season, adding that, “Other verbal agreements are in place but won't be released until they have signed on the dotted line.”
Four days later, there was no dotted line to be signed. A statement from another club, Hitchin Town, confirmed that they have been given a reprieve to continue playing in the Southern League Premier Central Division for next season. This has all been waved through extremely quickly, so what on earth has been going on?
Coalville Town finished 11th in the Southern League Premier Division Central at the end of the 2023/24 season. It was, without doubt, a disappointing return, with the club having been runners-up the year before and only getting knocked out of the play-offs in the semi-finals on penalty kicks.
But there appeared to remain cause for optimism. At the end of November last year it had been confirmed that work was due to start on upgrading their pitch to a 3g artificial playing surface, with the costs of doing so already covered, in no small part thanks to a grant from the Football Foundation. And while league performances had been underwhelming, crowds sat at just over 400, about average for their level of the game, while they had a run to the quarter-finals of the FA Trophy before losing to Macclesfield.
So, what about that statement, then? Well, clocking in at almost 800 words, it’s certainly substantial. Chairman Glyn Rennocks states that, “Over the last 2-3 years the costs of running a football club at this level have spiraled and the income has not matched the rise in costs”, but were this true we might have expected non-league football clubs at this level of the game to be dropping like flies. And they’re not.
So how does Rennock’s claim compare with the club’s own accounts? The accounts for the period to the end of June 2023 (PDF) show just under £20,000 in cash at the bank and almost £70,000 of shareholders funds being put in, the same as per the previous year. They figures aren’t great, but they do match his comments about what he’s put in.
But there’s also nothing in these accounts to suggest that costs—at least costs beyond the club’s control; wages are a different matter—have been accelerating at a rate that should be considered to be hugely problematic. It is understandable that Rennocks might not want to put further money of his own into the club, but why is this form of demotion the only alternative option?
Coalville’s entry on Companies House shows him as the sole director of the company, so his word was final on such matters, though at the exact time of writing his resignation as a company director (or, for the matter, the identity of any replacements) has not been put onto Companies House. The club’s resignation from the Southern League has been accepted and that would appear to be that, from the point of view of the men’s senior team, at least.
But all of this does raise the question of why Rennocks, who’d been involved at Coalville for years, should just decide to close the club down rather than put it up for sale or offer it to supporters, who could see if they could trim the budget to a level which is sustainable while remaining at this level of the game. Coalville is a town of 35,000 people. This is a community which should be able to support football at this level.
Rennocks also had some tart comments to be made about the local council, saying that:
…in recent years the once fantastic support we received from North West Leicestershire District Council has diminished, especially since a certain councilor came to prominence, and he has allegedly said that I personally should come under more scrutiny and has changed the council representative from Cllr Geary who has been for many years a fantastic representative for both council and football club.
This led to a terse exchange of words on social media between the councillors mentioned, but there is one line from it all which stands out:
I can absolutely say that in a conversation with Cllr Geary, he said to me: 'I agree that the council cannot continue to subsidise the football club'.
Well yes, we can probably all agree with that. Football clubs may be community assets—a fact reflected in the size of the grant given to get that artificial playing surface installed at the club’s ground—but some degree of explanation of what is meant by ‘subsidising the football club’ should probably be employed here, because while using council money to support youth and women’s football in the town could be considered a reasonable use of taxpayers’ money, using it to prop up a mid-table men’s Southern League football team probably couldn’t, and certainly not when councils are facing the savage sort of cost-cutting that they have in recent years.
No matter what the specifics of all this, what is jarring is the suddenness of it all. First formed in 1926, it’s only been a year and a half since they beat Notts County in the FA Cup before losing to Charlton Athletic in the First Round of the competition. Not long after they beat Chesterfield, this year’s National League winners, 3-1 away in the FA Trophy. In 2011 they reached the FA Vase final at Wembley before losing to Whitley Bay.
There is history, almost a century of it, here and that alone means that all concerned deserve a more substantial explanation than they’ve received so far concerning why this decision had to be taken and why it had to be taken in the way that it was. “Purely and simply the economics” and “I just didn’t want to do it any more” were the glib responses that Rennocks offered in an interview with BBC Radio Leicestershire in which he also continued his grievance against the council.
But Rennocks didn’t offer any explanation as to why alternative routes weren’t explored to volunteering to three relegations in one, and his answer to the question of what might happen if someone came in with the money to keep them going was, “I haven’t the foggiest”. He talked at length of how long he’d been thinking about it and how ‘emotional’ it all was, but offered no justification for doing this to the club and its supporters in the first place. All concerned deserved better.
Very strange situation as you say, almost as if he wanted to ball the home after playing so no one else could.